Sunday, January 29, 2006

I have a explanation of the four pre-Hobbes causes online here: helpfully and accessibly (I hope) set in terms of the cause of the First World War.

We saw last lecture that one of the many rhetorical tours de force that Hobbes achieves in Leviathan is the offhand manner in which he presents what can only be described as an explosionary change in the history of ideas: to wit, the collapsing of formal and final cause into material & efficient.In addition to any philosophical merit in Hobbes' eliminativism, his rhetoric successfully "eliminates" two vast territories of thought wherein an ordinary reader of Leviathan might launch an intellectual counter-attack to Hobbes' materialist dialectic.